Overnight camp – where time stands still and yet everything happens all at once. Where you spend all summer long living with a bunk full of best friends you may have just met. Where days are spent hiking, swimming, making ceramics or playing softball. Nights take place huddled around the campfire, or sneaking off to … whatever?

No homework, no commitments, no parents. What could be better than overnight camp?
How about camp with romance?

Some might find simply a summer love, a crush, something to be packed away with the mementos in September. But others find the love of a lifetime.

“Time is so compressed…it’s so intense at camp,” says Rabbi Ramie Arian, national director of Young Judaea, which runs six camps, including it’s high school leadership camp Tel Yehuda, in Barryville, N.Y. “You’re building a whole world, a whole community that squeezes a year’s worth of life into seven or eight weeks.”

Rabbi Arian should know. He met his wife at Eisner Camp, run by the Union for Reform Judaism in 1967 -- the actual summer of love -- at a music workshop. They stated dating two years later and will celebrate their 36th wedding anniversary in September.

Young Judaea’s Tel Yehuda has a pretty good track record playing matchmaker, he says. Though the camp doesn’t keep statistics on the marriages that result from camp romances, others attempt to. Camp Ramah, Conservative Judaism’s network of seven overnight and three day camps serving families in the United States and Canada, estimates that at least a thousand couples have married after meeting at camp. To date, 312 of them have registered on the Ramah marriages website, www.ramahmarriages.org.

“Camp relationships are very special,” says Nancy Scheff, communications director for the National Ramah Commission. “Based on shared interests and values, these romances often develop out of a friendship that forms first.” Scheff, who has written on the subject for an upcoming book, ‘Ramah: Onward from 60,’ notes that camp marriages tie the couple not only to one another, but also to the camp itself. “Ramah has many multi-generational ‘Ramah families’ in the fold,” she says. “It’s a very special shidduch that camp makes.”

As the Rockland couples who met their mate at camp will tell you in their own words, it’s all those things and none of the above. But for the following couples, clearly, overnight camp provided a summer of true love.

THE RHYTHM OF LOVE

Adam Issadore

Tara Issadore

Adam Issadore was 33, living in New York, when he heard about the reunion at Camp Akiba, he knew he had to be there. Camp was in Adam’s blood. For 13 summers, while his parents worked as assistant directors at the beautiful lakeside camp in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, he’d had the time of his life — swimming in the lake, sleeping under the stars—and the best part of each day, sitting around the campfire where his father, and other camp musicians, played guitar and drums. At Camp Akiba, Adam developed a passion for camp—and for drumming—and as he grew up, Adam didn’t grow out of camp—he found a way to combine his passions, by developing a program to bring drumming programs into summer camps.

Then, at the reunion, he found a new passion.

Though they’d been only casual friends as campers, he recognized Tara right away. But, talking with her now, he says, “I felt a little light go on inside.”

and at their wedding in 2008

“She seemed very real to me, very true,” he remembers. And later, though there were 500 people at the reunion, Adam made sure to find Tara at the campfire that evening. And as they sat, talking effortlessly for hours beside the fire, a little light went on in Tara, as well.
A few months later, the couple began dating and, after two years, they moved together, to Rockland County.

“I knew I wanted to marry Tara,” Adam remembers. So, in the fall of 2007, he invited her to drive up to the mountains. “She knew I always wanted to get away, to see the foliage,” he says. But one the way up, Tara suddenly realized, “Wait a minute. Are we near camp?” And then, suddenly, “Oh, God!”

“What?” Adam said, brushing off her surprise. “We don’t have to go there. I just thought, we’re staying so close to camp it might be fun to walk around.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’d like that.”

They explored all the places they remembered — winding up, after forty minutes beside the lake. That’s when Adam dropped to one knee and, pulling his grandmother’s ring from his pocket, he asked her to marry him.

“It was really beautiful,” he says. “We were both crying.”

Adam’s mom, who’d known Tara as a camper, was “psyched” when the couple were married on July 3, 2008, surrounded by family, friends—and camp aunts and uncles! A camp buddy even signed their marriage documents—and the father son performers “jammed with the band and rocked the house!”

Today, the couple lives in Nyack. Tara teaches yoga at JCC Rockland. You can read more about Adam’s work at www.Pathtorhythm.com.

THERE MUST BE SOMETHING IN THE WATER

Anne and Joel Zbar at JCC Rockland's 2008 dinner dance

“There must be something in the water at Surprise Lake Camp,” Anne Zbar’s mother used to quip. Anne has to agree. “There’s no better place than Surprise Lake,”—a Jewish Federation Camp in Cold Spring — “to meet a nice Jewish boy!” she says.

Anne should know. Anne and Joel met at camp, so did Joel’s brother, Mike, and his wife, Barbara—and so did five of the couples the Zbar’s call best friends.

Joel got to Surprise Lake first. A camper since 1965 when he was eight, Joel remembers Surprise Lake as a beautiful safe haven away from his city life in Brooklyn. A camper for eight years, a staff person for six more, Joel was 16 when he met Anne, a 15-year-old first time camper from Massapequa, Long Island, in 1974.

“My mother made me go,” Anne remembers. “And I cried the whole way up on the bus. I’d never been away from home—never been to sleep-away camp. I didn’t know anyone. I was really afraid.

“Two days later,” she laughs. “I was crying because I didn’t ever want to leave.”
But it wasn’t because of Joel… not yet.

It was the way that at Surprise Lake, there was no being left out —  everyone hung out as a group, making it easy to get to know people. That summer, they were just friends. But the following summer…

and at camp in the late 70s

When Anne returned to camp as a counselor, she noticed Joel on her first night. “Now this is an interesting guy,” she thought, watching him perform a comedic wrestling act. “Strange, but funny.”

When Joel’s antics caused a minor injury, Anne found herself helping him hobble down a path and suddenly… “That was it,” Joel says. “We were smitten.”

They became a couple right away and Anne remembers. “His old girlfriend even locked me in the meat freezer. But only for a moment! She could tell I was the one!”

Still, at camp, dating wasn’t exactly … dating. Wherever they went—bowling, pizza--the whole staff, a pack of about 40 kids, went too!

After camp, Anne moved to Florida but she and Joel continued to see each other. And so did everyone else. Every school holiday, the pack would gather — in New York City or Washington, D.C. --counting down the days until they could get back to camp>

It went on like this for four years — summer at camp, long-distance relationship the rest of the year—though they did manage to grab some time alone.

Joel enrolled at Brooklyn College and Anne came north for school, to Pittsburgh. Later, when she enrolled in physical therapy school in Brooklyn, they started planning their wedding. Two weeks after her graduation, they got married — surrounded by camp friends!
But their Surprise Lake camp connection didn’t end there. For the Zbars, who now live in Orangeburg, the year-round, lifelong connections they made — to their camp friends and to the Jewish community—has extended into every part of their lives. They maintained close ties with camp friends… and with camp.

When Anne returned to work at camp — her boys came with her. Growing up at camp gave Steven, now 23, Richie, 18, and Alec, 14, a built in connection to camp — and to the kids they met there. A connection so strong that When Alec, 14, celebrated his bar mitzvah, four camp friends stayed with the family all weekend. And when Steven went on his Birthright trip to Israel two years ago, a camp friend went with him. Next year, when Richie makes aliyah, five camp friends (one, the son of one of Anne’s camp friends!) will go with him.

As you can see, Anne says, “This isn’t really a story about a camp romance—it’s about a whole-family romance with camp!”